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The all-new Flipgrid is here! We’ve been teased for months with what improvements were on the way to this already phenomenal tool, and at a live stream announcement, the details were released. If you are new to Flipgrid, there’s no better time to get started than now. At it’s core, Flipgrid is a tool that allows you to post a topic and have students respond with video that is instantly uploaded to one location. It gives every student in class an equal voice and makes it easy for the teacher to share those voices beyond the walls of the school.

Today Flipgrid announced that more than 100,000 educators and more than 5,000,000 students use Flipgrid across 141 countries. In addition, a new Flipgrid video was shared every .48 seconds of every minute of every day since Jan 1 of 2017. Today more than 1.2 billion seconds of video have been shared by students and educators on Flipgrid, representing more than 38 years of student voice.

Here’s a look at many of the latest features.

Multiple Platforms in a Topic

As you construct a topic for your students, you can now embed Youtube or Vimeo videos or upload a high resolution image, link to a website or document, or include an emoji or GIPHY. These new features make topics more engaging for students, hook students into your topic, and personalize the experience.

Personalization of Responses

There are several ways students can enhance their response videos. One is by adding drawings or stickers to their profile picture. Each of these features can be turned on or off in the admin panel, but allowing them gives students a chance to show off their personality without affecting the quality of their videos.

Another is the ability to pause the video during a response and flip the camera to show different perspectives or props for a response.

Students can also add a title or linked file to their response which can give a bit of clarification, background story, or a hook into their response. Searchable hashtags make finding connecting responses a breeze.

Reactions

Students have always had the ability to “like” or “heart” a video. Now Flipgrid offers additional forms of reactions. A light bulb signifies a bright idea. A thinking emoji is for a response that made you think. A rocket means your response was out of this world and went to another level. Finally, (and sure to be a popular reaction) the mic drop is for a response that is just mindblowing. I can’t wait to see how students and other viewers use these reactions. I can imagine this becoming a way to build community to encourage peer and self evaluation of responses. Reactions are in your control as the administrator and can be turned on or off.

Sticky Note

Have your students ever had to toggle between multiple tabs to record a video and read from a script. Now, Flipgrid has a sticky note that allows students to type their script or notes and see them while recording.

Feedback

Flipgrid recently updated to include a rubric for giving students feedback on performance and ideas. This option still exists, but now in Flipgrid Classroom you can customize the kind of feedback that you can offer to students. You decide the criteria and the minimum and maximum points available.

Topic Customization

A relatively new feature in Flipgrid is the ability to freeze a topic so that it is still visible but students can’t add responses. Now, you can establish a date for a topic to automatically freeze without having to go in and freeze it manually. Flipgrid One users can now offer students a 15-second response option and Flipgrid Classroom users can now extend responses up to 5 minutes. Teachers can consider what time students need to fully answer a topic without compromising the quality of their responses or they can challenge students to be more concise with their words.

Response Community

As students receive responses to their videos, profile pictures of each response appear at the bottom of the original student’s profile picture. This allows the student to easily see that he/she has a response, but it is also a visual representation that their is a community of conversation around a response.

Better Access for All Learners

Now Flipgrid has a built-in QR reader in the mobile apps, so getting to the latest topic is just one scan away. Our youngest learners won’t be slowed down in sharing their voice with the community.

Dashboard

The administrator dashboard keeps getting useful updates for educators. Now, you can easily see which videos you still need to view. You can also see badges you’ve earned such as Flipgrid Certified Educator. There’s a helpful summary of all of your grids and activity with a graph showing dates of peak engagement. Flipgrid even has built-in tweets to share your achievements or fun facts about your engagement.

Flipgrid is always evolving because they are a company who listens to their users. Each new release brings enhancements that make Flipgrid more personal for users and continue to empower the voices of every person who takes time to leave a response. Enjoy these new features, keep suggesting new ones, and expect that in the coming months there will be even more features to enjoy from Flipgrid. Continue to engage with the Flipgrid community on Twitter using the hashtag #FlipgridFever and checking out the news on the Flipgrid blog.

We love using Osmo in our library for makerspace opportunities, centers, and lessons with multiple grades. We’ve had Osmo since it first came out. If you aren’t familiar, Osmo is an attachment for iPad that comes with a base and a mirror that attaches over the camera. There are 5 apps that are used with Osmo. Tangrams allows users to build figures with real tangrams that are recognized on the iPad app through the mirror attachment. Numbers allows users to use both numerals and dots to create different combinations that equal a set number. Masterpiece allows users to draw on paper outside the screen by following tracing lines on the screen. Words allows users to look at a picture and spell a word with letter tiles based on the image. Finally, Newton allows users to create angles to make falling balls bounce and hit a target.

Recently, they released their coding set.

It’s summer for us, so I haven’t had a chance to use the set with a class of students. However, I was able to hand the set to my 6 year old daughter to see how well she could use it straight out of the box. It didn’t take her long at all to figure out how to snap the various coding pieces together in order to get Awbie, the strawberry-eating monster, to find his strawberries and earn seeds to plant. Osmo coding has several built in tutorials in the beginning to show users which pieces to put together and as the game progresses, there are signs in the game that show how to add together more complex code. One thing I love is that there isn’t just one right answer. Kids can snap together small or large amounts of code to see what happens without being penalized. They can safely advance the character one space at a time or experiment with making Awbie move multiple spaces by snapping on a number.

After a few sessions of using Osmo coding, Alora decided to make a quick video to show off the pieces and how they work.

I will say that Osmo Coding has some glitches to work out. Sometimes when you press the run button, Awbie does not do what you have in front of him. Sometimes he’ll only move one space even though you have multiple commands lined up. Other times, you press the run button multiple times and he doesn’t respond at all. However, even with these glitches that I’m sure will be worked out in future updates, the game is engaging and easy to use. It’s a tangible way to introduce block coding to our youngest learners, as well as older learners too, and build up to online coding in other block coding programs.

I can’t wait to get more sets of coding and explore block coding with our earliest grades in the fall.

One of our favorite kinds of poetry to create each year is book spine poetry. It is a kind of found poetry where the words found on the spines of books create the lines of a poem. Every 2nd grade class came to the library for a one-hour session to create book spine poems individually or in pairs.

To begin our time, I briefly explained found poetry and then told a story about how I created my own book spine poem. The story was meant to serve as a model for how students might craft their own poem, but they certainly didn’t have to go about the process the exact same way as me.

I started in the everybody section of the library and started reading the spines of all the books on the shelf from the beginning. I was looking for a title that jumped out at me as a starting place. I happened upon Quest and Journey by Aaron Becker. I loved how those two words sounded together and I decided to start looking for titles that seemed to go with those two words, which meant looking for titles that were about traveling in some way. I passed by many titles that didn’t fit, so I left them on the shelf without pulling them off. I continued this process until I had found I Took a Walk, In My Dreams I Can Fly, and Goin’ Someplace Special. I also had the book The Ride but I decided that I didn’t like the sound of those words with the others in my stack so I put that book back on the return cart. Next, I tried several ways of arranging the books until I had a sequence I was happy with. After practicing a few times, I recorded my poem with my phone and uploaded it online to share with the world.

After my short story, we went back through the steps and put them into a concise list on the board for students to reference. Then, students got to work. They wandered the shelves looking for that first book and then went from there. As was expected, some of them found their own strategies for creating the poems. Some struggled with finding that first book. Some wanted the support of someone walking with them to look for books. The teacher and I wandered around too and talked with individual students until they started reaching the recording phase.

Once students recorded using an iPad, they brought the iPad to me and we immediately plugged the iPad into my computer and uploaded to Youtube. They also went to the teacher to take a photograph of their book stack that could be printed and put into their poetry books they are creating in class. All books that were used went onto a cart parked in the middle of the library, and students were welcome to read those books while they waited on classmates to finish.

When students finished, I pulled all of their work into Youtube playlists which I emailed to teachers to share with families. We concluded our time by sitting together and snapping for each poem on our playlist. I hope you’ll take a moment to listen to, enjoy, and snap for the poems from each 2nd grade class.

In my latest collaboration with our superstar art teacher, Rita Foretich, we are crafting with 1st graders. One of her art standards has to do with students creating a craft, which is defined as an art creation that serves a purpose. Rita is always pushing herself as a teacher to try new things and stretch the boundaries of what kids have experiences with. Along with this standard she wanted students to work with technology and to design in 3D. What resulted was an art project where 1st graders are designing pendants in a 3D design tool called Blokify, 3D printing those pendants, and then using them in art to create a functional necklace.

When Rita first told me about her ideas for this project, my first reaction was whether or not Blokify was the right tool. I had made pendants and charms in other tools like Tinkercad, but I knew that Tinkercad would be very tricky to do with a 1st grade class in the time frame we had. Blokify is very user-friendly for very early learners, but I had trouble envisioning a pendant. I even tweeted out to ask other people what they thought.

What helped me in the end? Tinkering. During our book fair, I pulled out an iPad and just tinkered at making a charm. I can’t say that I came up with anything brilliant, but I did come up with some examples to help students see. The most helpful thing was for them to be able to visualize what the hole for the string might look like.

Each 1st grade class came to the library during their art time. Ms. Foretich started the lesson with a quick video of a Makerbot in action.

It was fun to hear students talk about what was happening in the video because at this point many of them knew that it was a 3D printer, which would not have been the case a few years ago. Then, we showed the students the Blokify program. I really didn’t go into a lot of detail, but I showed them how to zoom in and out, how to add a block, and how to change blocks. Then, students had time to tinker at tables and get familiar with the Blokify program.

Ms. Foretich and I walked around to assist students who were getting frustrated as well as encourage students to try various parts of Blokify such as adding a row, deleting blocks, switching worlds, and switching blocks. Tinkering looked very different this year than it has in previous years, and my hunch is that students have more experience with Minecraft now, so they make the connection to this very similar program. I saw students being much more intentional about block placement even in tinkering instead of just tapping all over the screen.

We invited students back to the carpet after their tinkering sessions and gave them the specific task of the day: to design a one-layer pendant. We showed the examples that I had made as well as samples from other classes that had already printed.

Then, students went back to iPads and started a fresh design. They only had a short amount of work time to create their designs, and I was so impressed with what some of them came up with. They were so much more creative than my own designs! As each student finished we had to email the files to a central email. I had the email account pulled up on the board so that we could see if the emails came through. Many of them didn’t, so we were slowed down by errors. We had to go into the outbox of the email on the iPad and resend most of the emails. For students that we couldn’t email in time, we put post-its on the iPads so that we could email the files after they left.

On the library calendar, I blocked off time slots for me to specifically work on prepping all of the files for 3d printing. When you are working with over 100 .stl files to print, it’s time consuming. I was able to put about 8 pendants on each print plate. Each plate takes anywhere from 2-4 hours depending on how large I make the pendants. I name each file “Pendant 1”, “Pendant 2”, etc. Then, on a sheet of paper I write out the name and teacher of each individual pendant on the plate. These names are also written onto Ziploc bags so that finished prints can go into the bags ready for the art teacher.

I can’t wait to see how the final necklaces turn out once they return to art class. This has been an adventurous collaboration full of challenges, but there have been many rewards along the way too. It was especially rewarding to see some students shine at using Blokify even when they might struggle in other subject areas.

Students in 2 Kindergarten classes have been hard at work researching American symbols as part of their social studies standards. Doing research projects with the youngest learners in our school doesn’t look like it does in the upper grades. We think about what some of the biggest barriers might be for our young creators and put pieces in places to support students in getting over those barriers.

First, students chose one of four American symbols to research: American flag, statue of liberty, liberty bell, and bald eagle. In the library, we introduced students to a graphic organizer for collecting 3 facts about their chosen symbol. I learned from another Kindergarten teacher a few years ago during research to set an expectation that allows all students to succeed or exceed during the first research session. We asked students to have a goal of writing at least one fact during the first work session, but if they still had time, they should keep going.

Students used Capstone’s PebbleGo for their research. We love this database for many reasons but mostly because it breaks information down into manageable pieces and reads the text in a human voice for students. I modeled for students how to listen to a portion of the text and then think about what they had learned by listening. Then, we talked about what we would write on our organizer. This modeling was done with a different American symbol than the one students were researching.

At tables, I setup computers for students to use in pairs. We chose pairs because it gave students one more source of support as they worked. Also at each table, we tried to place an adult for support. The teacher, classroom paraprofessional, and me all worked at tables. If a parent volunteer or student teacher was available, they stayed at the 4th table. Otherwise, the adults took turns checking between tables. We found that we had to continue modeling for students how to listen, ponder, and then write rather than just copying a sentence off the screen. However, some students still chose a sentence to copy. All students left with at least one fact but many left with 3 or more.

After this initial work session, students continued their research in centers in the classroom. Then, they returned to the library for another work session in small groups. Each group came for 15-20 minutes. We did a short tinkering session with Chatterpix Kids to see how you can take a picture of something, draw a mouth on it, and then record that picture talking. Ahead of time, I chose creative commons images of the symbols for kids to use for their pictures. Rather than having every student create their own Chatterpix, each group created one Chatterpix video with the iPads. Each student chose one fact from their research to read.

Before recording, students chose their fact. We decided the order students would read and practiced a few times. Students helped take the picture of the symbol and draw the mouth. Then, we pressed record and passed the iPad to record. If we needed to record a few times, we did. Then, we uploaded our videos to Youtube and created a playlist to share with the class, families, and you. I hope you will take a moment to listen to their work.

I love building foundations of research in our early grades and seeing where these students end up by the time they are in 5th grade. We have a lot of work to do, but we celebrate the work of these Kindergarten students and what they have created.

Our open makerspace on Tuesdays and Thursdays is taking a break while UGA is having finals and winter break. However, the demand to use the makerspace doesn’t disappear just because UGA is on break. I decided to have a design challenge makerspace on two days and feature the Blokify app and our 3D printers. Since 3D printing takes a long time to complete, I decided to create some rules to help us out with the number of pieces we would need to print in a short amount of time.

Since Blokify uses blocks to design in 3D, I found some 8-bit winter designs to serve as inspiration for student winter designs. I blocked off six 30-minute time slots on the library calendar and made a Google doc for teachers to sign students up. I shared it with all teachers and encourage them to let any interested students come. There were 8 slots in each time block. It didn’t take long for the slots to fill with Kindergarten, 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders.

During each session, I gave a very quick intro to Blokify and shared the 8-bit winter designs to consider. I went over the rules as well, and students jumped onto the iPads to work. It was a short amount of time to design something, so I told students not to panic if they didn’t finish a design. As usual, students began looking at one another’s work for inspiration and helped one another with Blokify tips such as how to zoom in, delete blocks, or change the view.

It was fun to see what some of the students came up with and which students naturally gravitated toward this type of design because of their previous experience with block tools such as Minecraft. We had Santas, a menorah, Christmas trees, snowflakes, reindeer, presents, crosses, and a few randomly shaped symbols too.

Once designs were done, we had a process for getting them to me for 3D printing. I created a separate email account just for 3D files. Students went to “3D print” on Blokify and selected “Email to me”. They emailed the .stl file to the 3D printing email account. In the subject of the email, they changed the “untitled” file to their first name and teacher’s name. This would help me in getting the printed file back to students.

At the end of the day, I sat down, logged into the email account, and started putting the .stl files into Makerware and Cubify. Makerware works with our Makerbot and Cubify works with our Cube 3D printer. For Makerware, I put up to 3 student files in a row on the build plate. On a separate piece of paper, I wrote down the main file name and then wrote the student/teacher name in the correct sequence that the files would print on the plate. For Cubify, I could only put on design on the build plate at a time, so I named each of those files with the student/teacher name.

Once all of the files were complete, I loaded them on a USB stick for the Cube and an SD card for the Makerbot. Each day, I come in and crank up both printers right away and start printing the files.

I write the student/teacher name on a Ziploc bag and lay them out in the right order of the floor to await the finished print. When a print finishes, I remove and bag them. Then, I immediately start a new print. I’m making good progress and hope to have all of the designs printed by Friday. It takes a lot of organization to get this moving efficiently, but I finally have a process that is working faster than how I originally started.

I loved the experience of having a design challenge and hope that the students did too. I think if I offer these types of experiences more often, the students will start to develop their own ideas for 3D designs. They will also get more comfortable with the 3D design tools. We will try others in future design challenges along with Blokify.

I just love it when a teacher steps out and tries something totally new just to see where it goes. Some of the most exciting projects happen when a teacher gives himself or herself permission to say, “Hey, I have this crazy idea”. Mr. Coleman, 4th grade teacher, does this often. He isn’t afraid to step out and try something that no one else has done and look for the miraculous things happening all along the way.

Fourth grade is currently studying colonial life in social studies. He wanted to weave in something from our makerspace or some new type of technology that would allow students to engage with the content in different ways. During a quick brainstorm, we tossed around several ideas and he reflected on them overnight. The next day, he came back with the idea to create stop motion videos that showed the perspectives of various roles in colonial America.

To start, students watched many stop motion videos in class just to see what they looked like. In the library, they came for a tinkering session using Stop Motion Studio. As we usually do during tinkering, I encouraged them to press every button to see what it did. I also told them to not focus on creating a polished product but to try out many different strategies to see what worked best for stop motion. Most of these students had never made a stop motion video before. They grabbed Legos, stuffed animals, and pipe cleaners to use in their videos and got to work.

Mr. Coleman and I walked around and tried to give students tips that we were observing from other groups. The main thing we noticed is that students were constantly moving the iPads which ruined the effect of stop motion. They also weren’t taking enough pictures to show movement. A few students started getting the hang of both of these, so we relied on them some to help other groups. We also found it helpful to regroup and have kids share tips to the whole group as well as share out own tips.

Back in class, students selected a perspective to showcase in a stop motion video. Many students were drawn to either slaves or women. They formed groups and started developing a plan. Across 3 one-hour work sessions they came back to the library to create their videos. They pulled things from makerspace, used objects around the library, brought things from home, and made things to use in their videos. Some groups jumped right into their projects with a lot of success while others had to learn to work together or how to back up and try again. Mr. Coleman also gave them some time to work in class.

I loved how different strategies developed during the work time. Students began using their computers as a setting and stage or used library bookends to help characters stand up.

Mr. Coleman and I constantly walked around to conference with groups. We had them back up and look at their work to see where they might need to add pictures. We also had them talk through their story to see if they had enough to tell a perspective.

Mr. Coleman plans to take these videos and continue using them in class. Students might write out scripts and do voice over or maybe they will add music and simply attach an accompanying script. However this goes from here, it was a big leap in using technology and tools we have tinkered with in our makerspace. Many pieces wove together to support a social studies curriclum standard in a creative way. Student interests, creativity, and expertise came into play in many groups. I invite you to take a look at their work in progress. This Youtube playlist is the raw footage that still needs to be finalized, but I always like to show that our work is never really finished. There’s always something more we can do.